Social platform Ping.it launched in public beta today as an alternative communication and content sharing tool that combines social media and email.

Everyone knows the fatigue of wading through social media updates. Ping.it has found that on average, a person spends 12 hours on the internet a day, but due to the ever changing supply of information they are often bombarded with an influx of relevant and irrelevant content. Therefore, there needed to be a way to manage and filter this information.

Enter Ping.it

Based in Oslo, Norway, Ping.it is a hybrid of the two communication platforms: social networks and email. As a communication platform, users have all of the benefits that email and social media offers, by being able to share information in both a public and targeted, private setting.

After signing up for a free Ping.it Account, users merely have to import their contacts and drag the bookmarklet button into their browser. When they see content that they want to share, they can "ping" it to others.

Recipients of the pinged content can then choose to, in a format similar to that used by Pinterest, comment on the ping, like it or re-ping it. Unlike other forms of social media, users don't have to have a Ping.it account to see the shared content and unlike email, no email address is associated with their account so users can avoid unwanted spam messages.

Ping.it users can also organize their contacts in three different groups, similar to the circles in Google+, depending on the type of content they want to share.

Contact groups: These are personal groups that only the account user can see. They are similar to email contact lists, such as "Work" or "Family" lists.

Private groups: These are closed groups for those users who need to collaborate and share content in a private setting.

Public groups: These are public groups that can anyone can join, but only selected contributed can post content.

All of the content that is pinged is saved to a "graphical social stream," so users have a record of what they've shared.

The Goal of Ping.it

The company hopes that this new approach to mass communication will not only improve social interaction, but that they can been seen as a solution to information overload, as only content that users want to see or might be interested in is displayed through the Ping.it platform.

Ping.it solves two of the biggest problems online today: bloated inboxes and crowded public walls and the solution is simple -- a Web inbox without an address, where you receive personally recommended links," says CEO Marius Lian. "In Ping.it, you only get the content you want, from people you accept, as you only share with your contacts what’s relevant to them. That is the key difference.”

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